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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
As discussed in the previous thread, I agree that having hate for fat people is a bad thing. I also think it's pretty uncommon and hardly the point. When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat. The claim that we "should treat them poorly" is also doing too much work - what exactly is meant here? Sure, don't just randomly be a jerk to a fat person for no particular reason, all good and agreed. Are people obligated to feign attraction to them? Aside from just literally not being rude to people for no evident reason, I'm unclear what the expected standard of treatment is that people feel isn't typically met.
It's more that normal people - both for logistics/convenience reasons and instinctive judgements of appearance - don't want to date fat people, don't really want to be friends with them, don't even want to look at them. This is a very unpleasant situation to be in. The analogies to other forms of 'exclusion', e.g. for minorities, aren't entirely without merit! It's just that the solution should be for the obese people to lose weight, by whatever means, rather than create acceptance. It simply is not technically difficult to take in fewer calories, and if an individual can't muster the will to do so themselves (although that itself is terrible), they should be assisted.
There's an obvious rhetorical claim (that is fundamentally misguided imo because the mental health memeplex is also bad) comparing obesity to self-harm and anorexia. We don't tie 'lack of stigma' for self-harm and anorexia to suggestions that it's fine to continue doing those things, we instead treat them.
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Many of my activities are about hiking/cycling and similar activities. I would not go on a walk across city with someone incapable of walking for few hours.
That it is not about complete exclusion, but more of feasibility. And I would put significant effort to help someone on say wheelchair or with serious disease but I am less willing to invest effort to help someone eating themself to death.
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Can only speak for myself, but when I meet a person who's not just fat (hell, going by BMI I'm technically overweight and have a fairly noticeable beer belly) but actually morbidly obese, my instinctive reaction is disgust. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. I see no reason to think that this instinctive reaction is ever going away, nor even that it should. Of course I still go out of my way to treat morbidly obese people with respect and good manners, but my knee-jerk reaction is disgust.
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Absolutely. If you're in an elite circle, your friends and the people who you visibly spend a lot of time with can have a huge impact on your reputation. At the same time, being obese just automatically imposes negative consequences on your friends - you require more food, you are less physically capable in a way that rules out vast swathes of physical and social activities and you have to be specially accounted for in a huge variety of ways. When you are fat you actually do place a substantial burden on the rest of your friends (if they aren't as fat as you already) and while people are generally nice and will accommodate a more rotund friend, they would prefer it if their friends were all in shape.
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You're free to simply not care about your reputation, but this doesn't mean you get to ignore the consequences of it. Having a bad or low-status reputation has a direct and serious impact on your life in countless ways, and while I would agree that too much importance is placed on those social games, they remain both important and relevant at every level of society - the elite qualifier was placed there because if you're one of the obese people living in the trailer park you don't actually care that your neighbour is just as fat as you are.
Subculture matters more than class here, in my opinion. But even then, obesity prevents you from participating in a huge range of extremely popular and rewarding activities of all kinds - social, leisure, commercial, artistic, religious etc. I personally do not want to be close friends with obese people because they are going to be unable to participate in huge numbers of social bonding activities that I regularly take part in and enjoy - I don't think going for a long walk to have a beautiful picnic under the stars in a national park is particularly class-related, but it absolutely is something you don't get to do if you're obese! At the same time, I don't want to have to make a decision between an activity me and my friends want to do, and a less satisfying compromise that we have to take because Cletus is just too fat to participate and we don't want to make him feel awkward.
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Moral uprightness? I'm legitimately surprised that you're a Christian, because the bible actually has a few things to say about fat people!
So not exactly a positive appraisal - gluttony is generally considered to be a major sin, but the bible goes even further and suggests that being friends with fat people actually disgraces your father. There's direct biblical support for fat shaming, and while that quote comes from the old testament the new isn't any kinder to the gluttons and still considers it a major sin. Being obese and not doing anything about it means that you are sinning unrepentantly, and people are actually being good Christians when they shame you and try to get you to change. That said, in the interest of being honest and forthright, I feel compelled to note that I'm not a Christian myself - The Antichrist and the Genealogy of Morals were far too compelling and I haven't even seen any Christian apologetics that try to grapple with them. I was one once however, and I still know enough about the faith to understand that it generally recommends against sinning, and it really doesn't like when you're actually proud of your sin and demand that other people accept it. The same kind of social shaming that you're railing against actually comes directly from your own religion, and when you say "I'm not okay with people having a bad reputation because they are fat." you are directly contradicting the word of God and elevating your own judgement above his while encouraging people to sin more. Personally I think that's a good thing and I'm happy that you feel this way, but at the same time I believe Christianity has a few things to say about thinking that you know better than God about what's right and wrong.
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You should never have your opinion changed by one conversation. Claiming to have your opinion changed in the opposite direction by a conversation is just a "gotcha", and if truthful is just as stupid as having your opinion changed in the direction that your opponent wants. Once you've researched it a bit, determined that you don't need to fall victim to epistemic learned helplessness, and read rebuttals to the argument that convinced you and still determined that you think it's a good argument, then you can start changing your mind.
I must also wonder what you think about people who have poor hygeine instead of fat people. By your reasoning, you should not care about hanging around with people who have poor personal hygeine.
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It's important to keep the spectrum in mind here. I have friends who are 'overweight', they can hang out fine, maybe they're out of shape and can't go on a hike or whatever, that's not really an issue. Getting into obese, logistics becomes more of an issue, but appearance is still more of a factor than that imo. Morbid obesity would rule someone out of social activity among 'elite' or even many normal circles both for social and logistical reasons, I think, but it's not really an issue as 'we' never encounter those people anyway, ssc different worlds. Morbid obesity is 9% of the US population, though!
Being slightly overweight is not a particularly big deal. I was using obese as the dividing point under the assumption that obesity is where you start getting real and serious limitations due to your weight. Morbid obesity is a whole other kettle of fish - but at the same time my objections apply even more strongly to the morbidly obese than regular obese people. What kind of social life can you possibly have in an existence like that?
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Sorry I expressed that quite poorly, I was speaking in terms of actions / revealed preference, and not as one big thing, just a bunch of small things, death by a thousand cuts, the 'halo effect' of attractive people multiplied and reversed. The kinds of looks you get change, people are less enthusiastic about interacting with you and reach out less, etc. You won't have no friends, but you will feel the difference. Explicit mocking of fat people isn't that uncommon in certain spaces, but it's not really what I meant.
Wasn't attributing it to myself! Interesting to talk to and appearance have no inherent correlation, plenty of really smart people have been ugly / fat in the past. Although today there is a strong correlation for cultural reasons I mentioned elsewhere (young upper-class people aren't fat)
Eh. "You shouldn't shoplift not because you'll go to jail, but because our people have a common interest in prosperity upheld by free transactions among people with property rights and stealing undermines that". "You should dress nice and have good hygiene, not because people will like you less if you dress poorly and smell bad, but because healthy skin is valuable and society having a good aesthetic is morally important". For quite a few people that's not why they do those things. The cause of much prosocial behavior among random people just is coercion and shame, and even if it's unfortunate (and has many bad side-effects), it clearly works, and that mechanism probably wouldn't exist if everyone was able to do everything for the right reasons.
That part of my comment was more motivated by - trying to paint a vibe of why the fat acceptance movement exists and what they're fighting from a sympathetic position. So on the one hand, i guess i succeeded? On the other hand, I might have painted a misleading picture.
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